The next internet: A quest for speed

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What would you do differently with 10 gigabits per second (10Gbps) of data bandwidth to your home and office? If the innovators working on designs for the next generation internet are successful, your dreams can come true. It is easy to take for granted the increasingly massive amount of data we send back and forth every day over the internet and the extraordinary growth in the number of people using the internet, but there is a limit to how much our existing network infrastructure can take — and we’re quickly reaching it. Fortunately a group of university and corporate researchers backed by US government grants and funding from the industry are hard at work designing what could be called Internet 2.0 to address growing needs in speed, scale, and security in the design of the current internet.

Making the internet smarter

In the same way that we talk about a “smart grid” for electricity, one avenue of internet research involves making our current network infrastructure smarter about the data it carries. The decades-old stack of layers architecture that underlies almost all networks — including the internet — deliberately restricts interactions between those layers. This isolates applications from the network they use, making it possible to invent and deploy new transports and even physical networks without rewriting applications. This separation of layers has helped the internet family of protocols spread like wildfire to new types of physical devices like satellites and cell phones, but limits how smart it can be in optimizing data. Without expensive and dedicated caching solutions, for example, the current internet doesn’t know that a million identical copies of a new hit single are being downloaded and that it could just send along one copy to all million users.

Keren Bergman at Columbia has begun to tackle exactly these issues, by creating cross-layer protocols so that the physical data layers of the network can provide feedback to applications — allowing them to optimize their use of the network based on actual conditions, much like the addition of real-time traffic monitoring has become an essential element in GPS software. Bergman’s vision of a smarter internet, like a smarter power grid, can optimize the bandwidth already in place, but is still limited by the overall capacity of the network — making it an important, but not sufficient, solution to our growing need for bandwidth.

Making the internet faster

Going in a different direction, working to dramatically increase the bandwidth of the internet, researchers at the University of Arizona and eight other universities — all part of the same NSF-funded Center for Integrated Access Networks (CIAN) that Bergman is — are attempting to create an all optical version of the internet that can provide up to 10Gbps to individual users. By replacing the electrical circuits used to connect the optical fibers that make up the backbone of today’s internet with optical chips, they hope to eliminate enough bottlenecks to increase end-user throughput by almost a thousandfold.

To recreate electrical circuits with optical components, many of the basic building blocks of electronics have to be reinvented for optics. For example, within the past year researchers at MIT developed a way to create the optical equivalent of an electrical diode — a device that causes information to flow in only one direction, and the team at the University of Arizona came up with a method for restoring degraded optical signals. Meanwhile, teams from Caltech and Canada managed to transmit 186Gbps over a 134-mile-long optical network.

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